Fun Freetime: Butterfly Garden Activities for the Whole Family

 

Planting a flower garden in your backyard is an incredibly rewarding experience. You get to see your plants grow, flourish, and add vibrant color to your surroundings. With the right plants, you can also attract colorful butterflies and other valuable pollinators to your garden. These bright and beautiful insects are fascinating to observe, and present the perfect opportunity to get the kids excited and involved in the garden. 

Creating and maintaining a garden can be the perfect family activity for summertime or after school. Here are some butterfly garden ideas and activities to help you set one up. 

First, create a raised flower bed in a sunny area of your yard. Plant flowers that attract adult butterflies with their nectar and nourish young caterpillars to help them grow. If you choose plants like milkweed and butterfly weed, for example, you might even see a monarch emerge from a chrysalis! 

To increase your chances of attracting butterflies, include shrubs for them to take shelter in, incorporate moisture in the form of a birdbath or saucer, and avoid using pesticides in the garden. You can even lay out a dish of overripe fruit, such as bananas or orange slices, to create a butterfly fruit-feeding station. 

Once you have your garden set up, it’s time to enjoy it! What are some ways to get the kids involved? Practice observing and describing the different butterflies that visit your garden. Download and print out the butterfly garden coloring sheet below by Angi to let kids color in the different butterflies and caterpillars they see among the flowers. Then, you can help them identify each butterfly based on their colors. 

Another way to make gardening into an engaging family activity is to print out the butterfly garden weekly journal page below. Each week, you can put the journal page on the fridge or in a binder. After tending to the garden together each day, you can help the kids check off which plants they watered, write down the garden to-do’s and goals, and jot down any interesting observations about the garden that day. 

With these butterfly garden activities, you can encourage your child to spend more time outdoors while exploring their curiosity about the natural world—all from the backyard!